To Look Ahead
by akg.writes
Summary: The past is known and offers comfort but it is gone and powerless. There is a price to pay for only looking back.
1. Chapter 1

_Author's Note: Let me admit straight off the bat that I haven't been watching this show and what little time I've had for writing fanfic, it's been video games and... I, uh... Well, see, while visiting for Thanksgiving, a dear friend who has made it a habit of informing me all the ways in which I'm wrong (this is why we're friends) informed me that I was wrong for not watching this show. We watched a few episodes. She wanted a story. You know, I don't even know what I'm trying to say here. I think I just want to make sure that no one who specializes in fanfic for this show is insulted that a newbie is contributing. It's well intentioned!_

* * *

"You mean to say that you, Lieutenant, an officer of the law and a senior member of your paramilitary organization, have not been properly educated in the use of a blade?"

Lieutenant Abigail Mills looked up from her laptop, one unimpressed eyebrow raised, her right forefinger temporarily ceasing its rapid-fire assault on the 'Backspace' key. The interruption was probably for the best, really. Of all the buttons on her work-issue laptop, she had found 'Backspace' taking significantly more abuse than the others since making the acquaintance of the currently scandalized-looking man sitting opposite her. She could only imagine the look on the Captain's face if she could no longer backspace and had to submit her unedited, first-draft reports. It was amazing what actually seeing a headless Hessian brandishing an assault rifle had done for the Captain's capacity for understanding, but the two of them had come to a tacit agreement: he would support her in every way possible as she and a two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old once-dead man ran about town trying to save all of humanity from certain doom... and she would do her damnedest to limit the number of rewrites and redactions he had to do on her reports. She considered her old buddy, 'Backspace', an absolutely critical partner in this endeavor.

Her other partner, the two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old once-dead one, was staring at her in open, scandalized shock. Truth be told, she rather enjoyed the look. He was normally so proper: his long hair tied back, his shoulders squared and his hands clasped behind his back, and his emotions controlled enough that what little he wished to express could be done with little more than a quirk of his lips or a flick of an expressive eyebrow. She supposed that secretly though thoroughly enjoying that scandalized responses of a man from another time spoke to a latent sadism on her part. Given the complexities his arrival in her life had generated, though, she needed a few joys. She didn't feel particularly bad about this one.

She also suspected that he knew just how much she secretly enjoyed it and had accordingly stopped trying to dampen his righteous indignation over such societal despoilings as outrageous taxes on donut holes. He was a gentleman, this one. Whatever compulsion it was that drove him to open doors for her was somehow the same compulsion, sincere and unaffected and as ingrained a part of him as his speech patterns, that did not begrudge her this boon.

Her eyebrow inched up impossibly further. "Crane," she said patiently, "this might come as a surprise to you, but we don't get a whole lot of bad guys who want to cross swords with the local constabulary."

"Oh, certainly not," he shot back, "and as Sleepy Hollow is a bastion of normalcy and a shining beacon of modernity and grace in a world gone mad, perhaps I should temper my shock and withdraw my question."

She felt her lips twitch indulgently. Only he could say 'Shit's cray-cray around here!' in such an elegant way.

He huffed - almost certainly for show since he'd no doubt caught the telltale twitch of her lips just as she'd caught the self-satisfied quirk that had momentarily crossed his in response - and then turned back to the dusty tome that had held his attention fully prior to her obviously surprising confession.

"It is not merely a skill, Lieutenant," he muttered as he delicately flipped to the next aged page in the tome, "though if there is any local constabulary that might need such 'antiquated' skills in this day and age, I daresay yours is likely the one. No, indeed, it is a symbol of station, a visible and tangible manifestation of the rigors of the body, the discipline of the mind, and the fortitude of the soul." His eyes flicked up at her for just a moment, underneath the few wisps of his hair that had escaped their bindings, then returned to the ancient lettering he was busily translating. "It is an indignity that you have not been gifted this symbol."

It wasn't always just the _way_ Crane said things. Sometimes it was just the things he chose to say.

Since joining the Sleepy Hollow PD, Mills had been to every annual banquet thrown by the City to honor the officers. She had eaten every catered meal, sipped every chosen wine, accepted every crayon drawing handed to her, and listened to every perfectly prepared speech. Not a single one of these so-called honors had ever made her feel as deeply as Crane's simple statement just did.

She vaguely wondered when people had stopped expressing such heartfelt things to one another. She vaguely wondered why. And then it occurred to her that even if she wanted to express such a beautiful sentiment, she wouldn't know how. She didn't even know how to accept such a thing, let alone offer it.

"And an indignity that I'd probably chop my own leg off within ten seconds of someone handing me a sword?" she asked dryly.

He huffed again. She wasn't sure if it was because he continued to be scandalized by her apparently quite unforgivable inability to wield a sword... or because he recognized her continuing inability to accept a truly genuine, sincere, and unabashedly heartfelt statement without deflection. She suspected it was the latter. It made her a little bit sad. He had crafted a heartfelt sentiment and packaged it up for her with beautiful words and she didn't know how to accept it.

Sometimes, watching him discover facets of the modern world made her proud. Electricity. Cars. The Internet.

Sometimes, watching him discover facets of the modern world made her just a little bit sad. Just in passing. It just occasionally seemed as if maybe he'd lost things that donut holes and cell phones couldn't make up for.

Speaking of cell phones...

"Mills," she said briskly.

It was testament to the vastly changed circumstances of her life and the enviable ability of the human brain to acclimate rapidly to such radically changing circumstances that she spent the majority of the Captain's call watching Crane try not to watch her. She could distinctly remember a time where if she had received a call from anyone with the sorts of details she was now hearing from Irving, she would either have dismissed it as a stupid prank call or done everything in her power to keep the clearly disturbed individual on the line while she called for backup on another. As it was, she merely catalogued what Irving was telling her as she would any other call, committing all the important bits to memory, and watched Crane try and fail to not eavesdrop.

She couldn't decide if he was trying to be polite by not listening or if he genuinely had no idea what the proper social response actually was. It occurred to her that the closest social equivalent in his time would have been for someone to literally walk up to a group unannounced, interrupt the current conversation without waiting for any kind of natural break or making any attempt to acknowledge others in the area, and simply begin talking to the person of their choice. Surely that would have rankled him. Hell, when put like that, it even rankled her.

The call ended and she stuffed her cell phone in her pocket before, in a flurry of well practiced movement, she locked her computer, retrieved her gun, and fished her car keys out from under an untidy pile of file folders. "Looks like we've got a body," she said to Crane without preamble.

He raised an eyebrow at her. "Indeed," was all he said. He carefully closed the book, meticulously ensuring that the pages were not folded and that the tattered leather binding was handled with appropriate caution, his movements as precise and practiced as hers but with a sort of sincere, unaffected grace that she lacked... or maybe just one she'd never had the time to cultivate. Or made the time to cultivate, maybe.

Speaking of time...

She rushed toward the door, tucking her gun into the waistband of her pants, and flung it open, already thinking about the logistics of getting to the crime scene as quickly as possible with current traffic conditions.

Crane caught the door easily, held it, and said merely, "Lieutenant" with a slight inclination of his head as she flew through. He closed it securely behind them.


	2. Chapter 2

In a world of faucets and televisions and Internets and disposable cups, Ichabod Crane had found himself a bit at odds; these marvels were unfamiliar, uncomfortable. Learned to use them required, it seemed to him, the same sort of unseemly spluttering and coughing as a boy taking his first gulp of a man's drink: all ignorance and bravado underscored by the obvious fact that the drink was received well enough by others and therefore was just a matter of experience and practice.

Moreover, such marvels were simply _things_ and _processes_, after all... far smaller and faster and easier than the _things_ and _processes_ that had fulfilled nearly identical needs in his time but still the vehicles and mechanisms by which such needs were met. They were marvels but not unknowns. The _things_ and _processes_ of this time were new and different but the needs they met were as familiar to him as his own heartbeat.

He was not much more at odds now, really, than he recalled being when he left the comfort and familiarity of England and first set foot in the Colonies. Then, as now, he was reassured that the inevitable strengths and weaknesses of humanity, waxing and waning though they were wont to do, were inescapable truths that defined necessity and drove innovation.

No, the mechanisms by which people of this time fed themselves, clothed themselves, educated themselves... These did not concern him. He did not know them but he understood them. These were constant truths of the human condition and it would only be a matter of time before he was fully capable of operating those mechanisms.

It was the _people_ of this time that were a far bigger concern to him as not only did he not know them but he did not _understand_ them. So many of the 'truths' of his time had scattered to the winds, proven factually by the passage of time to be ephemeral and therefore not a truth at all. The distilled essence of humanity remained intact and recognizable, trussed up differently with smaller things and faster processes though it was, but all the accoutrements that turned humanity into society were changed so fundamentally that he could not even trace how Then might have become Now. It was easy enough for him to see a pair of what the Lieutenant had called 'jeans', categorize its characteristics, and trace its origins back to the trousers of his own day. It did not mean he found 'jeans' particularly comfortable - when, precisely, had Man cultivated the hubris necessary to willfully put his manhood so close to jagged, metal teeth? - but it meant he understood their origins, had found an analog in his own time, and could conceptualize them accordingly. He could not do the same for the people.

He had not yet begun to worry about his lack of understanding when he had first met his fellow Witness. There had been much about her that had been strange, very strange indeed, but it had not caused him undue alarm. She had been well fed and healthy, far more so than an emancipated slave could possibly have expected even in the best of circumstances; she glowed with a good health that had been reserved in his time for the highest echelons of society, those capable of consistently providing adequate food of good quality. She had been armed, training her sidearm at him with a steadiness that showed both both training and practice with the implement itself, as well as a discipline in body and mind that only came from field experience; he knew not who would willingly put a woman in such a position as to have to learn how to use such a weapon, nor allow her to stay in such conditions as to force her to earn expertise. She had been wearing trousers and he still could not remember which realization had hit him in the gut hardest: the realization that he, a strange man not of her family, could clearly see the well developed musculature of her legs... or the realization that everyone else could see the same and rather than acting to either protect her reputation or ensure that her licentiousness could not startle others, they were entirely unfazed by it. She had been a senior member of the local constabulary and while he made no notice that she held a position of power - women, he had found, held the vast majority of positions of power, though they were often not called such, and did so with a grace and fortitude and calculation that most men could not match - she clearly served alongside men with no distinction between them, and he could not fathom the great needs of a society such that it might expect a woman to not only exert her own power but to wield the power of a man as well.

No, as strange as it all had been, he had not begun to worry about his lack of understanding until he first held the door for Lieutenant Mills.

She had been walking ahead of him - and let it not be said that a woman of her small stature could not keep an impressive pace - and had been doing what he assumed to be her honest best to care for him. He was uncertain at that time if she thought he was merely a madman, albeit a nonviolent and well-meaning one, or if she was beginning to believe that he might be speaking nothing but truth to her regarding his origins, but either way, she had clearly considered him a person who needed her guidance and she had been providing it, walking ahead of him as if blazing a trail for him, squaring her shoulders as they neared her base as if preparing to fight a battle for him.

He had skirted easily around her and held the door for her, reaching out to grasp her elbow and guide her over the threshold, a smooth and practiced movement that would not have forced so much as even the faintest break in her formidable stride.

She had looked at him with an expression that was faint warning with a hint of mild amusement. It was far more jarring a combination than if she had abruptly thrown his hand off of her or if she had demanded he never dare to touch her again. He could have understood either of those reactions. Instead, she had merely looked at him with that odd look on her face and said dryly, "I got the door, Crane."

That was when he had realized just how little he understood and had the first niggle of worry that maybe what little he understood would not be enough to learn the rest, that maybe he could learn how to use the 'remote control' but that he might never, ever understand the people.

Of _course_ she could get the door. She had stood her ground like a warrior goddess of old against a Horseman of the Apocalypse. He found it extraordinarily unlikely that any person capable of such a feat could be defeated by a door. He had held it for her because it was a show of respect for her as a woman and for her as a ranking officer, and because it was simply what was done, what he had done since he had been a lad old enough to recognize the importance of such tiny gestures. Anyone could give a rousing speech describing honor and respect - though, arguably, some could do it far more eloquently than others - but these were the gestures that showed true, lasting, genuine respect. They were symbols of civilization, nods to society, gestures of honor and respect so fundamental that they simply happened as a matter of course. Cornerstones, really... guides against the chaos of a beautiful but inherently wild and dangerous world.

He had both insulted and amused her with the gesture and that was when he realized that perhaps he would never learn enough. He would learn which way to turn the faucet for hot water and which sequence of backlit, inlaid buttons to press to properly make the 'popcorn'... but he truly might never understand the people. The society. The things he had held as true had been proven through the passage of time to be anything but.

"Laying it on a little thick there, aren't you, Professor?" one of her constables had once asked him after he had yet again gained his feet when Mills entered the room. It was a modern colloquiallism, clearly, but the meaning was clear enough. Standing in the presence of a lady was considered here to be something less than a display of respect both for the lady and for the society which she represented. It was an act. A show. Possibly even something done in order to earn some kind of favor, if the unseemly, almost lecherous look in the constable's eye were an indicator.

Crane did not understand it and he found himself genuinely terrified that perhaps he never would.

He comforted himself, as always, with the knowledge that after reading Lieutenant Mills's files, the human capacity for evil was clearly unchanged and, by the same token, surely its capacity for greatness was similarly undiminished. It meant he could still bear Witness, even for a people he did not understand.

"Wondering which demon of the week we're going to be seeing today?"

He glanced over at his fellow Witness. She was mostly looking at the road ahead of them - a welcome habit, that, as they were hurtling effortlessly forward at a breakneck speed Crane had yet to grow accustomed to - but she darted a glance at him, a question in her deep, brown eyes.

"I did not realize we had begun classifying our hellborne foes temporally," he countered.

She smiled faintly at that. He'd noticed she'd been doing more of that lately and he considered it a vast improvement over the haunted, pinched look she had worn for so long after their initial meeting. It spoke to her strength of character, her resilience.

"You looked lost in thought," she explained.

He considered that gravely, allowing his eyes to loosen just enough so that he could appreciate the trees flying past the windows of their vehicle without growing dizzy. "I was indeed in thought," he said after a moment, "but I do not believe I was lost. I find my thoughts, disjointed and often self-absorbed as they are, to be comfortable and familiar. I could no more lose myself in them than I could lose myself in my childhood home."

He felt her gaze fall on him for another moment before returning to the road. He suspected he had yet again failed to answer a question in an expected manner but once again, Mills did not seem to mind. She had begun acclimating to him, he suspected, as he had to her. Her world confused him as he was sure the vestiges of his, the bits which still clung stubbornly to his personhood, confused her... but she was beginning to understand him and he thought, every once in a while, that maybe he was beginning to understand her too.

Perhaps she would be the anchor that would allow him to understand the greater world around her, a focal point of such clarity that the bits of the world closest to her could not help but be drawn into focus too.

He at least was beginning to learn what made her smile, even faintly. He considered this a quite welcome advancement. He was not certain what would be asked of them as Witnesses but whatever it was, he imagined it would be easier to face if they managed to find little joys on their shared journey toward it.

"Call came in about fifteen minutes ago," she said, her voice taking on the business-like quality that told him in no uncertain terms that he was dealing with Lieutenant Mills and not Miss Mills. It was quite breathtaking, really, the way she was able to change so much of what she presented to the world at a moment's notice. A chameleon, able to change its appearance to attack or to protect, but never changing its substance.

She glanced at him again and he had the distinct feeling she knew he had been indulging in one of his tangential thoughts. She snorted slightly but did not roll her eyes. "Man was out walking his dog and stumbled across the body," she continued instead of calling him on it. "Coroner is en route but Captain wants us there pronto."

"He suspects something unusual then," he concluded. He had no idea what 'pronto' meant but her general meaning seemed clear enough.

She shrugged slightly. "He didn't give more information than that but sometimes I think what he doesn't say is more telling than what he does. I think 'unusual' might be an understatement. Something in his voice. Here we go."

She pulled the vehicle over to the side of the road, placing it carefully behind another, and hopped lithely out of the vehicle, slamming the door behind her with a perfunctory almost dismissive movement that he had begun to... appreciate? He was uncertain if 'appreciate' was the proper word to describe his feelings on the subject as it inherently connoted some kind of approval and he did not actually approve of it... but he at least had come to expect it and to see how it helped created the image she wanted and needed to portray in situations such as this one.

It was much like the disposable cups he had encountered, he thought to himself, as he too exited the vehicle though he took care to shut the door properly and with all attention due it. The car had fulfilled its purpose and Miss Mills had dismissed it from her thoughts as soon as it had done so; shutting the door with care was not related to its function and she had already moved on to other immediate tasks and thoughts.

In some ways, Crane thought as he caught up to her, it was quite elegant. The extraneous bits had been removed, leaving only the essence of necessity in its place. In other ways, he found it somewhat sad. If everything was defined by necessity, of moving from one need directly to the next without pause or thought to the interstitial reality between them, what then? There was either unfilled and unused space between one need and the next, draining light and color and richness away from a life, or the goal was no longer to enjoy those moments of true life and instead replace them all with pure function.

Was that the price of the marvels of this world then? he wondered. In order to create and sustain such marvels, was every moment of every life to be filled with function? Was the price of these luxuries an inability to enjoy the longer moments of _life_ they should have created?

"Well, this is new."

The Lieutenant was not gifted with undue eloquence but she was capable of distilling complex thoughts and feelings into single, succinct statements without sacrificing any meaning. It was a different sort of skill. He found it quite impressive.

He came up to her side, approaching the body carefully, unable to keep his eyebrow from inching toward his hairline.

The victim was a woman, of a height Crane would consider almost godlike for his time but which he had learned was only slightly taller than the norm for Lieutenant Mills's time, and it was clear from the unblemished, smooth lines of her cheek as well as the pertness of her body, that she was relatively young. She might have been beautiful, he thought, had she not been frozen in death in both her youth as well as in the position of her passing: she had died running, looking in fear over her shoulder, and whatever had taken her life had frozen her thusly.

"Indeed," he agreed. He circled the body warily.

"Look, Lieutenant..." said the young constable, rubbing his first two fingers against the pinched skin between his eyes.

"We got it here," Mills reassured him. "Finish up the witness statements."

Crane could not tell if she merely wanted the younger constable away from the body or if she were genuinely worried about his ability to process what he was seeing but she managed to sound both compassionate and firm when giving the order. Her tone brooked no argument but it was lightly wrought with understanding; it was like a deadly sharp sabre whose hilt was inlaid with light gold filaments.

He found himself wondering if the War would have lasted quite so long if she had been permitted to hold this role within the ranks of their army. He suspected not.

He went back to perusing the body, circling it once more with his hands clasped behind his back, and when he came to a stop, Lieutenant Mills appeared at his elbow. She was small and gifted with soft step, he had found. It took an inordinate amount of effort for him to keep tabs on her position relative to his own such that he did not accidentally trod over her. He was fairly certain that she would not shoot him for such a transgression... but not so certain as he wished to experiment.

"What do you think she's covered in?" she asked in an undertone.

An important question and one that Crane was not prepared to answer. Short of describing the pure white, tiny, scintillating crystals as precisely that, something his fellow Witness had no doubt already catalogued fully for herself, he was at a loss. Whatever substance covered the victim, it covered her in her entirety; he saw not a hint of skin through the sparkling mass and so perfect was the covering that it retained every facet of her body in near perfect clarity.

"I could not begin to guess," he admitted in the same soft tone.

Instead of continuing to fight a battle he had not the tools to win, he cocked his head to the side and inspected the woman's face. Not so young as he had originally thought, perhaps, though it was difficult to tell in Lieutenant Mills's time. He looked at her for a moment longer and felt his brow furrow slightly. The look on her face was one of fear, yes, but not of abject terror. He found that interesting. Certainly any demonic force capable of killing her precisely as she ran would have engendered more than simple fear.

He glanced over his shoulder, mirroring the body's position. He glanced back at the body... then back over his shoulder... back and forth... back and forth. Mills, one now gloved hand holding a pencil and the other trying to fumble open a small clear bag, watched him out of the corner of her eye, but he ignored her for the moment and she seemed willing to wait for him to include her in his suspicions.

No terror, he mused, looking once again at the victim's beautiful, frozen face. Fear... but no terror. She had not seen what had killed her. She had not seen it in the moment of her death, nor had she seen it before. She had been scared... but not scared for her life. It was almost as if she had felt the need to run, had started to run, but had turned around to see precisely what it was that she was running from... and that low-level but non-specific fear had been caught on her face in the moment of her death, captured in a perfect moment frozen in time just as a sculptor might take an unformed piece of marble and -

His mouth dropped open.

"Lieutenant, I do not think she's merely covered," he said and found his voice slightly shaky, not nearly loud enough to adequately convey the urgency of his theory. He took a step forward, hand outstretched to stop Mills. "Stop. I think she -"

Mills, pencil held delicately between thumb and forefinger with the plastic baggie angled perfectly below it, immediately froze at her partner's order. "Crane," she prompted, a hint of warning in her voice.

The wind provided a much more succinct follow-up to his warning than he could have managed.

It gusted once... and the frozen woman dissolved before their eyes, the perfect clarity of her body reduced to a pile of tiny white crystals, sparkling in the light.

He made it to Mills's side a moment later. Mills, her pencil and baggie still outstretched but now preparing to sample nothing more than thin air, had not made a sound but he was now standing close enough to her that he could feel the faint shaking in her body. He could sympathize.

"Salt, Lieutenant," he said, unashamed of the croak in his voice. "She was turned into a pillar of salt."


	3. Chapter 3

"Not just any salt."

Mills deposited two mugs of coffee on the desk, nudging one toward Crane, before fishing around in her pocket and dropping a baggie of white crystals in front of him.

He looked vaguely sick and hastily stood up, banging his knee on the underside of the desk as he did so, pulling his coffee mug away to a safe distance and protesting, "Good God, Lieutenant Mills, show some respect for the dead!"

Her eyebrow arched. "That's table salt, Crane," she said patiently. "From the break room."

"Oh." He stared suspiciously at the baggie for a moment. "Of course." He regained his seat and wrapped his still-cold hands around the mug of coffee. "You have a point to make then."

"I do indeed," she said, throwing a hip over the edge of the desk to make herself comfortable. She retrieved her own mug and made a cheers-ing motion in his general direction before taking a long, steadying gulp. "Table salt. It's typically fortified with a number of things to address any number of nutritional deficiencies. Most common is iodine. Sometimes iron salts or folic acid too."

Crane blinked and picked up the baggie between a thumb and forefinger, gazing at the tiny crystals within. "You have modified _salt_?"

"Not me personally, no," said Mills, tone dry and clearly designed to stave off an impending tirade about the sacredness of salt and the sheer hubris of the people of her time to dare modify something so natural, "and you'll have to find someone who didn't fail chemistry to tell you any details... but for now, just take my word for it that the salt we use for cooking has a bunch of distinctive stuff added to it... including some anticaking agents that make it this perfect, non-lumpy, free-flowing stuff. " She grasped his hand and shook it lightly, the salt in the baggie he held swishing around uniformly.

Her hand was warm. She rarely touched him in general but she almost never connected skin-to-skin; she was warm and not-quite-soft and he found the combination appealing. She used her hands for work, real work, but clearly spent her private time making concessions to femininity; he wondered just how much of her life was a similar sort of balance between the hard and the soft. He suspected that on her busy days, of which she had many of late, that she erred on the side of the hard. He was unsurprised. Part of him suspected that his fellow Witness could and would strangle a demon bare-handed if left no other choice. He supposed even light callusing would help when wringing the life from a minion of the underdark.

In any case, she rarely touched him. He was uncertain if it was simply a habit of hers or something she had adopted with regards to him. It was likely some combination of the two. He had noticed that there was very little platonic physical contact between people, especially between men and women. It was difficult to fathom how a society which did not heavily stigmative out-of-wedlock relations could place such restrictions on platonic interactions. He wondered if the latter did not force the former, as people in their beautiful and flawed human condition sought out contact with others.

It occurred to him that it was probably rather unseemly to be thinking, even in the academic abstract, about out-of-wedlock relations.

"Your point, Lieutenant?" he said.

She released her hold on his hand. "There's a saying," she said, taking another sip of her coffee. "'Just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get me.' Well. Just because Sleepy Hollow is not, I believe you called it, a bastion of normalcy in a world gone mad... it doesn't necessarily mean that everything we see is a harbinger of the coming Apocalypse." She sighed. "It occurred to me that maybe we were just mistaking some sick, stupid prank for... for..." She waved her hand.

"The hellish work of the Devil," he supplied helpfully.

She sighed again. "Right. That."

He indulged himself in simply observing her for a few moments and found that she looked weary. This happened to her sometimes. He was at a loss how to fix it but as soon as he could devise a theory, he would risk an experiment. She did not look tired so often anymore but he worried that what had replaced it was not the supple strength of a willow but rather the brittle, hardened strength of something far less forgiving, something that would snap under sufficient strain rather than bend.

He had found that the people of this time celebrated their science as previous societies might have celebrated their gods. He thought that was a fine characteristic. He simply thought it was perhaps a bit close-minded, particularly of those gifted with a talent for science, to assume that the inherently unknowable did not exist simply because it could not be known and it was this apparently unspoken concept that seemed to cause undue problems for Mills.

She had made some significant leaps forward in this regard, allowing a belief in the occult to co-exist rather peaceably with the hardened science that seemed to underscore virtually everything in her world, but he was not so blind that he did not see the toll it took on her. Sometimes she looked tired. Weary. Exhausted by the efforts to reconcile what she knew to be true against the demands of a society telling her otherwise. Sometimes her normally strong shoulders lost their firm set and rounded in. Sometimes her proud chin dropped. Sometimes her normally lightning fast blinks, necessarily evils that interrupted the constant vigilance of her dark-eyed gaze, slowed as if she used the momentary blankness to steel herself for what she would see next.

"So I thought, well... maybe it's just a bunch of stupid kids," she said.

"'Stupid kids' with an incredible artistic gift," he corrected. "If mere sculpture it was, then its construction was the work of a master."

"Right. But then the lab results came back." She nodded toward the little baggie he still held. "No additives whatsoever." She dropped a photograph of the innocuous-looking pile of salt sitting by the side of the road. She tapped a finger against it. "Perfectly white. Free-flowing. Uniform crystallization. Just like that." She nodded toward the baggie again. "But not table salt. Nothing we've refined. No indication whatsoever that it's ever been touched by a modern refinery. In fact..." She raised an eyebrow at him. "Three guesses as to where the chemical composition analysis says the salt of our victim came from... and the first two don't count."

He blinked. He glanced wordlessly down at the photograph of the little white pillar of salt. "Forgive me, Lieutenant, but I am not familiar with the rules of your game. Does 'Sodom and Gomorrah' count as one guess or two?"

"I'll give it to you," she said. "Dead Sea Works. Or more specifically, Mount Sodom."

"The youth of your time have access to almost unimaginable resources," he said after a moment, "but it seems extraordinarily unlikely that prankster children would procure unrefined, natural salt from halfway around the world and somehow imbue it with the properties it now holds... all as part of some elaborate plot to confound the constabulary."

"Couldn't have said it better myself." She gave him a tight smile. "So that leaves us with three possible avenues for figuring out exactly what the hell is going on: 1) who the victim is; 2) what she was running from; or 3) who or what turned her into salt and why. The first one is proving unusually hard as I don't actually have a body. We're going through missing persons reports but even if we happen to get a hit, I'm going to have a hell of a time convincing anyone that the pile of salt in the morgue is her body."

"Perhaps you can find a gentleman named Lot in the area who has recently misplaced a wife."

Mills paused, her coffee cup frozen halfway up to her mouth. "Was that a joke, Crane?" she asked. He merely raised an eyebrow and she sighed, shaking her head. "I'm clearly a bad influence on you."

"I studied our unfortunate victim's face at length," he offered, this time without jest. "Perhaps I can assist with the identification process."

"It may come to that," she agreed, "but I was hoping you had something to offer on numbers two or three. Isn't that your specialty, Crane?"

"Not by choice, I assure you, Lieutenant," he replied archly though he tempered it with an almost-smile to honor her almost-teasing tone. "Sadly, unless you have received a recent report on your... radio..." - he pronounced the unfamiliar syllables carefully - "about a city of unpenitant sin falling to fire and brimstone, I am uncertain if my knowledge on the subject is likely to prove helpful."

"I'm going to go ahead and say 'no' on that one," Mills said. She slid off the edge of the desk and walked wearily back to her side, sinking into the waiting chair. She smelled faintly of soap, something distinctly chemical, and something lightly floral, as she normally did. It was a unique combination that Crane found fascinating both in the abstract as well as in practice: it was clearly not a perfume, unless women of this time did not dab scents to pulse points, but the effect was still very distinctive; as he could have recognized Katrina in a dark room solely by the combination of her own body and the oils she dabbed to her throat and wrists, he could recognize Mills by her soaps. It was comforting in an odd way. People of this time bathed far more often than those of his and while he understood the necessity, it had created a very antiseptic, almost cold, reality; the constant cleansing of the skin, the masking of natural odors, seemed to be yet another barrier these people erected around themselves. But even in that, he found at least some comfort that when Mills walked past him or settled into the car next to him, she smelled familiar. She didn't smell like her but she at least smelled familiar.

It was an odd thing to think about... like so many things of his old life he had never thought about until they were gone and the fabric of his reality seemed patchy and threadbare.

She continued half-heartedly, her voice echoing slightly in the coffee cup she held to her lips, "Not because I don't think a city of unpenitant sin would fall to fire and brimstone around here, mind you... but because we'd be the first ones Irving would call if one did."

Crane accepted that and then commented, "You looked tired, Lieutenant."

He said it quietly, with no hint of accusation and certainly no overt concern; the former was easy to manage and the latter significantly less so but by his calculation, both were worth the effort. His fellow Witness was a woman whose formidable strength was challenged only by an indomitable and almost ferocious independence. He had no desire whatsoever to give her even the faintest impression that he did not think her capable of caring for herself because, truth be told, it would be an insult almost beyond measure as he found her far stronger than anyone he had ever met. He trusted her completely to do one of two things under virtually all circumstances: to either be able to keep herself together or to recognize her inability to do so and promptly ask for help. Part of him, of course, hoped for reasons that he could not precisely define that if she did find herself in need of assistance, he would be the one she would ask... but that was not relevant to his firm belief that she had very few limits, was willing to push herself to them, but knew at all times precisely where they were and when to ask for help.

But she did look tired, had looked tired even before they'd gotten the initial call from Irving, and he felt she should know. There was a slight chance she would react poorly to his assessment - and rightfully so, as they were still feeling out exactly what 'partners against the doom of our time' meant in terms of social boundaries - but the likelihood of it being more unpleasant than, say, a dousing in demon blood (unusually viscous with acrid overtones and a distinctly rotted finish) was relatively low.

His barometer for 'acceptable' had changed of late.

She made a face at him. He found it entirely unladylike and remarkably adorable. He would not share either of those opinions as either was likely to end poorly for him.

"Not all of us got to sleep for two hundred years, Crane," she shot back. She waved a hand dismissively. "I didn't sleep well, that's all."

He straightened up in his chair. "Did you have another vision?"

"Not unless you count the sheep jumping over a fence one-by-one," she said.

He looked at her blankly.

"Never mind," she said with another wave of her hand. "I just spent the night doing more thinking than sleeping, that's all. Sometimes I just have to spend a few cycles thinking about how all this" - and she gestured to the room around them - "was not really part of the plan."

"I think we can safely say that all this" - and he mimicked her gesture to the room before adding his own to indicate the two of them together - "is precisely part of the Plan."

She gave him a look. "I can literally _hear_ you capitalizing the 'P'." She sighed. "Let's just say it's not something my high school career counselor listed as one of the options." She jerked her chin to indicate the photograph of the little pile of salt. "Tell me about Lot's wife there."

He glanced down at the photograph. He compared the image to the one he had in his mind, of the perfectly preserved woman, the perfect detail of her face, of her eyes, of even the folds of clothing she wore. It was a sad comparison that he felt in the pit of his stomach. "You seem familiar enough with the tale," he said.

"Sure am," she replied. She propped her feet up on the table. "Tell me anyway. Or if you happen to know another tale of someone getting turned into a pillar of salt, _Professor_, that'll work too. But we're either being too literal with this - we're assuming it has anything at all to do with Lot or Sodom and Gomorrah simply because that's the only story we know - or we're overlooking something in the story itself."

"In that case, Lieutenant" - and here, he placed his own boot-clad feet on the table, mimicking her casual pose - "there were once five allied cities collectively called the Cities of the Plain: Admah, Bela, Gomorrah, Sodom, and Zeboim. Of these five, only one - Bela, later called Zoar - was spared a day of judgement; the others ultimately succumbed to divine judgement and were brought to ruin. In the Biblical telling of the tale, angels of Yahweh first spoke to Abraham about the great sin of these cities and Abraham asked if the cities should be spared if fifty righteous people could be found within their walls; the Lord agreed to spare the cities should fifty righteous people be found. Abraham asked, then, for forty-five... then forty... then down to a mere ten; and the Lord agreed that if a mere ten righteous men could be found, the cities could be spared. Ten such men could not be found, though, and in fact the behavior of the Sodomites toward the visiting angels reinforced the great sin of the city; only Abraham's nephew, Lot, and his family were warned by the angels to leave the city of Sodom before its imminent destruction. They were warned not to look back." He folded his hands in his lap. "Lot's wife looked back upon the city as it fell and was turned to a pillar of salt for her disobedience."

"But we don't know why she looked back," Mills said.

"Lieutenant, unless you have made some significant discoveries in the last two hundred years, we don't even know her _name_," Crane said with a hint of reproach in his voice. "She could have looked back to catch a last glimpse of her home as it was razed to the ground. She could have dropped a parcel and looked back to retrieve it. She could have found her end for no other reason than one of the women with whom she exchanged pleasantries at the well that very morning screamed for help and she instinctively looked back at the sound of her name. We know merely that she looked back."

Mills drummed her fingers around her coffee mug. "I'm not sure that helps us at all. I don't suppose there's some sort of special word or phrase in Aramaic that just didn't get translated to English properly? Some kind of Aramaic incantation to bring forth a salt demon that got mis-translated as 'looking back'? Bust this case right open?"

"It speaks volumes to the flexibility and resilience of your mind that you now believe an ancient incantation to bring forth a salt demon would constitute 'busting this case right open'," Crane said dryly. "More importantly, however, less than one percent of the total verses in the Hebrew Bible are in any form of Aramaic." His tone was chastising. "The rest is in Biblical Hebrew."

"Biblical Hebrew then?" Mills looked at him expectantly over the edge of her mug. "Don't tell me you read it in English. I won't believe it."

Crane snorted. "As a matter of fact, Lieutenant, I've read 'it' in both," he said. He ignored Mills's smirk. "Though I daresay which texts precisely constitute the canonical 'it' remains a debate in and of itself even in this day and age. So to answer your question, Lieutenant, no." He dropped his feet back to the floor where they belonged. "I recall no such translation errors or any particular nuance of the original language that was not adequately conveyed in the translations in this particular instance. We simply do not know more."

"And you can't think of any, oh I don't know... Mesopotamian god-demons or something... with a penchant for salt?"

Crane gave her a look. "Lieutenant, this may come as a surprise to you, but I am not an inexhaustible source of knowledge from antiquity." He took a gulp of coffee, muttering, "And we would more accurately be looking for Akkadian, Babylonian, or Assyrian god-demons and even then, we would be painting with brush strokes far too wide to give proper respect to the sheer..."

Mills was smiling at him.

He lost his train of thought.

He huffed again. "Well played, Lieutenant," he said rather ungraciously into his mug.

"You're cute, Crane," she said.

Before he could deconstruct the statement properly - it sounded enough like a compliment from a beautiful woman that he felt it in his stomach but he was fairly certain that the last woman to call him cute had been a spinster great aunt so it was a difficult thing to reconcile - she stood up, dousing his nose once again in the all-too-Mills combination of soap and chemical and flowers.

"Here." She slid her laptop over to him. "Looks like we're striking out on two and three. That leaves one. Here are all the missing persons reports in the area, ordered most to least recent. We're going to have to figure out who she was if we're going to make any kind of progress. Remember where to click?"

Crane looked down at the dreaded laptop. At least there were no women of ill repute adorning its screen. Yet. He wasn't sure which of the myriad buttons summoned them.

"I believe so," he said, carefully drawing a finger over the small square at the front of the laptop and watching the image of an arrow on the screen move accordingly. He meticulously nudged the arrow down past the grainy image of a doe-eyed child, past the block of text describing the child in rather unhelpful generalities, and down toward the blue text saying 'Next'. He looked to Mills for confirmation.

"Atta boy," she said, pleased. She squeezed his shoulder.

He had no idea what that particular phrase meant but he decided it was unimportant as his partner sounded pleased with his effort and, perhaps more tellingly, had indulged in one of her few affectionate physical gestures.

"I'll get us some more coffee," she said, reaching over him to retrieve his mug in another flurry of soap and chemical and flowers. "Holler if you find anything."

He, of course, would do no such thing. If he was fortuante enough to find something of interest, he would make note of his findings and give her his report properly: in person and in a respectable speaking tone. But he nodded his agreement. "Of course, Lieutenant."


	4. Chapter 4

"We have had this discussion before, Ichabod."

The vast majority of the times he had seen his Katrina in her undeserved purgatory, she had looked... taut. She was as a violin, breathtaking in its elegant lines and perfect in its sinuous simplicity, but with pieces of it pulled tight to their absolute limit, the entire structure and purpose of its polished and perfect shell dependent upon, even defined by, the tightness of the strings. His Katrina looked thusly: beautiful and sinuous but held tight, fast, by the very definition of her nature. The indomitable spirit that had first enchanted him was there, undeterred and resolute and so passionately familiar that he could not help but feel it steal the very breath from his body... but it had lost its wildness, its ferocity, its freedom. In its place was a steely, beautiful resolve that bore all of the strength and none of the fire.

Seeing her visage now - her flawless porcelain skin still taut and her hair still dark and thick in what could prove to be eternal youth at a cost greater than he could ever have imagined and her eyes, those incredible pools that had ensnared him with their earnestness and sincerity even when she was promised to another, alight - he was reminded of the changes he had noted in his Lieutenant Mills. He viewed her strength as that of a willow, supple and resilient, and he worried that the burdens she bore would gradually change that strength to something hard, brittle... something still powerful to be sure, something perhaps even stronger, but something which he could not picture as providing sanctuary to those needing shelter from the rain or casting an enchanting reflection in a gently rippling pool. He had seen something similar in his Katrina, saw in her a strength that was defined by iron where once her strength had been flame.

As he took a step toward his beautiful and indomitable Katrina, the grey and misty hues of her world coming into focus around him, it occurred to him that he had never compared his Katrina to Lieutenant Mills before. He had compared his lieutenant to Katrina before. He had compared many things in his new life to Katrina before. He had never compared her to anything else.

He wondered if perhaps he was beginning to acclimate to the world Katrina's spell had created for him... that he was beginning to consider the new world and the people within it a new sort of baseline.

He did not know how he felt about that.

He did not care as his Katrina, his beautiful Katrina, looked weary.

Again, he was struck by how she looked like his lieutenant, how weariness suffused her beautiful countenance but instead of detracting from her strength, it somehow reinforced it. Showed what it cost, perhaps, but did not detract from it.

He had made the comparison again. He still did not know how he felt about that.

"I did not come here to speak of our son," he said as he reached out and grasped her upper arm, if only to reassure himself that in this place, he could indeed touch her. "I would speak of him until I could take every memory of yours and create from them with perfect clarity a memory of my own. Never has an absence of something weighed so heavily. But I did not come here to speak of him." He tried to smile and wasn't sure he entirely succeeded, admitting, "Though I do not know how or why I come here at all."

She smiled, that beautiful and perfect smile that even in her strength and her spirit and her weariness lifted his heart, and touched his cheek. He leaned into the caress. "My Ichabod, you come here because your heart looks for me."

He exhaled against her hand. "How could it not?"

She drew her hand across his cheek and the fact that he could not hear her skin scraping against his beard reminded him that he was in her world, not his own. Or perhaps, more accurately, not Lieutenant Mills's. He would never be in his world again.

"There will be a time, Ichabod, where your soul will make demands of your heart," she said softly.

He could not bear to draw away from her. "You speak in riddles," he murmured into her hand, reaching up to clasp it with his own, hold it tight to his cheek.

"There are powers at work, dearest Ichabod, that are greater than you, greater than I, and with the grace of God Himself, greater than Moloch and the eternity of darkness he promises." She pressed a kiss to the back of his hand, the one which anchored hers to his cheek. "These powers seek to teach, to guide. The lessons are not easy. They are costly. You must listen to them. You must learn."

He gripped her hand. "If such powers exist, can they not help in the battle we must wage? If these powers are so great, can they not bear arms with us against the darkness?"

She smiled at him again. "That is not their purpose."

He drew away from her, slowly and reluctantly, but he found that it was made easier by the painful knowledge that in this world, her body held little warmth, her embrace only ephemeral comfort. He could not help but draw a hand down her perfect cheek though.

"You look tired, Katrina," he said and realized only after the words had crossed his lips that he had said the exact same thing to Lieutenant Mills.

"We are all tired, Ichabod," she replied and somehow, he knew that she knew they were both speaking of Mills as well. "We are all of us soldiers in the same war."

He dropped his forehead to hers. "You are stronger than I could ever have imagined, Katrina," he confessed quietly.

"Then you've a poorer imagination that I'd have guessed, Mr. Crane," she said and for just a moment he saw in this beautiful, hard warrior a hint of the fiery girl who had first enchanted him. She took a deliberate step away from him. "Go now. He will notice soon that you are here."

"Katrina -" He took a step forward to try and make up the distance between them.

"Listen to your lessons, Ichabod," she said. "They are not without cost. The cost is worth it only if you learn."

"I will listen," he promised and as he felt a sudden jerk deep in his stomach, as her world around him faded to a misty and indistinct grey, he hoped desperately that he could do as she had bidden him... that he could indeed be taught.

His eyes snapped open and he found Lieutenant Mills standing over him, one hand on his arm, her dark eyes filled with wary concern. The scent of soap and chemicals and flowers filled his nose.

"Crane?" she prompted.

"I had a vision," he said, sounding even to himself just a little bit dazed.

"Tell me on the way," she said, not unsympathetically, squeezing his arm before letting go. "We have another body."


	5. Chapter 5

"Which first: vision or body?"

It was testament to how much Ichabod Crane had risen in her esteem that Mills even bothered asking him the question instead of just giving him an order. If he had been any man other than the one he was, or if their circumstances together were anything other than what they were, she would not have even considered that he might have some input that could change her idea of where their priorities should be. Abigail Mills knew what was up and she might not always do things the easy way, but damn if she didn't always get them done.

Given who he was and who they had become together, though, she accepted the possibility that his vision might be proactively capable of saving lives where her police report was even in the best of cases merely reactively capable of the same... and she trusted him enough to make the call.

It was one thing to trust another person to have her back. Under most circumstances - bad guys with guns, yes; demonic hellspawn creeping unto the earth as harbingers of the impending apocalypse, well, maybe not so much but she wasn't sure that was a fair expectation either way - she could trust even the younger members of the police force to merely _act_. It was an entirely different thing to trust someone else to _think_, to trust them to do it _right_, to believe - truly and honestly _believe_ - that listening to them, factoring them in, would make the ultimate decision _better_. Crane was like that. She trusted him to think, she trusted him to do it right, and she truly and honestly believed that listening to him, factoring him in, made her decisions better.

She truly and honestly believed that she and Crane together had a hell of a better shot at success than either of them did alone.

She wasn't entirely sure how she felt about that. She was rational and intelligent enough to know that she should probably be totally cool with anything that would make decisions better when the problems she was facing involved demonic hordes. On the other hand, she was also stubborn enough not to want to admit that there might be a single thing that needed to be done that Abby Mills couldn't damned well do on her own.

Pride was probably not the best way to stave off the apocalypse.

And who was she to say no to help? Would a sea captain turn his nose up at the good omen of an albatross just because the sun was shining warm and pleasant down on him, giving the inherently treacherous sea a placid, sparkling sheen? She doubted it.

Of course, she wasn't sure she would really consider Crane good luck. She kind of had a chicken-and-egg issue with Crane and the whole Sleepy-Hollow-getting-overrun-by-hellspawn thing. But if he _wasn't_ good luck, well, she'd had ample demonstrations that he was something better, something more tangible.

He was also faintly majestic when he was in his element, she mused. When he was in the skies, he _soared_. She thought he was pretty damned amazing though she'd never tell him that.

Of course, he tended to crash land rather spectacularly when it was time for him to join her on the ground. She thought he was pretty damned adorable and she wouldn't mind so much telling him that.

The point was, if she could figure out how he said those sincere, beautiful things he so easily said, she'd totally give it a shot. She figured he should know just how much it meant for her to trust him with something like this. With anything, really. She'd trusted Corbin with more than her younger and stupider self would ever have thought possible, but how much of that was _actual_ trust... versus the amount that was the combination of her being trained to obey senior officers and him having put himself out there for her, what with his wisdom and his father-figuring and his damned apple pie? Crane, on the other hand, was at best a transplant from two hundred years ago and at worst a complete madman who had managed through sheer force of his considerable charisma alone to convince her of their shared roles as Witnesses against the coming apocalypse. And still she trusted him. She fucking _trusted_ him.

It all came down to the Cat question, really. She didn't actually own a cat because she knew better than anyone else exactly how little business she had owning a pet, even one as independent as a cat. But if she did have a cat and if she asked Crane to feed, by hell or high water, he would feed it. She knew he would. And that was the difference. Corbin would have fed it if he'd had no pressing calls. Jenny would feed it if she were around, though she'd be grumbling obscenities unfit for a proper cat's ears the entire time she did it. Hell, even Morales would feed it... though, arguably, he would skip a few times when it slipped his mind, though never to the long-term detriment of the cat, and he would never admit he'd done anything but follow her instructions to the letter. Crane, on the other hand, would feed her cat exactly as she had specified, would never question the details of said instructions, and would do everything in his power to make it so... and if by some increasingly not-rare chance that he was being pursued by a demon and could not fulfill the duties she had entrusted to him, he would confess to her in full and sincerely beg her forgiveness.

There was also a good chance that if he thought for a moment that the cat was not cooperating, he would cajole it into doing so. She could quite clearly picture him trying to reason with a housecat over an uneaten dish of cat food.

And that was why she trusted him. She _trusted_ him.

But of course she had no idea how to say any of that beyond a completely unrelated, matter-of-fact question as they hopped into her car and sped away from the station.

There was also the small fact that though she didn't think Crane was really qualified to judge anyone else for their oddities, even she had to admit that it was just a tad bit odd to compare one's partner to an albatross or to quantify trust by the hypothetical feeding of a hypothetical cat.

She took a small amount of comfort in the fact that if she were actually insane, it was entirely his fault. He, after all, was the one who under even the best of circumstances had unwittingly married a witch, been blood-bound to a Horseman of the Apocalypse, and been resurrected two hundred and some-odd years after his death. Under the worst of circumstances, he was a madman: a handsome, charismatic, and chivalrous one, to be sure... but still a madman.

"The vision," Crane replied and if he had any suspicion that she had just confessed a powerful and painfully personal truth to him, he did not give any indication.

She wasn't particularly insulted by his seeming lack of awareness. Had she been in his time, if he were a reasonable standard of the people of his time, she would have been able to turn the whole albatross thing into something flowery and elegant and articulate. She probably would have chosen something other than an albatross actually. Maybe an eagle. Eagles seemed legit for the 1700s. Right?

Even if she could construct some beautiful statement that somehow captured just how important she thought it was that she trusted him - with an eagle and not an albatross, she reminded herself, and maybe she'd leave out the bit about him possibly being a madman, and she'd definitely have to figure out something better for the whole hypothetical-cat-feeding thing - she doubted she would have the courage to share it with him. Courage to face demons, sure; she could manage that because, hell, what the hell else was she going to do? Stand aside and let them reign over the earth? Over her well and truly dead body. But courage to tell Crane just how much she trusted him? Hell no. She had no idea why it was so scary but seeing as how the entirety of humanity did not depend on her willingness to do it, she was okay with just filing it away as being Too Scary and not revisiting it. Totally okay with that.

"Lay it on me," she said.

She didn't dare look over at him since it had begun raining in spectacular fashion during their time in the Archives, but she could feel his blank look on her even without glancing over at him.

"'Lay it on me'. It means that you should tell me all of it," she explained without waiting for him to ask.

"Ah," he said in that simultaneously adorable and frustrating tone he had which indicated he was filing it all away in the same place he had filed scattered minutiae about... well, hell, whatever constituted 'history' for a professor of history at Oxford in the eighteenth century. "A reference, perhaps, to Atlas and his burdens."

"Sure," she agreed. She had no idea. "Sounds legit."

"I spoke with Katrina."

Ouch. She felt that one in her gut. She had no idea exactly why she felt it in her gut but she did. That had been happening more often and she wasn't pleased with the development. She had the terrible feeling that she was actually jealous of his mostly-kind of-maybe-partially dead wife but she really didn't want to know why. If she was actually jealous of a mostly-kind of-maybe-partially dead woman, it said a hell of a lot more about her than it did about anyone else and she was pretty damned sure the things it said weren't flattering. More importantly, who the hell was she to feel something like that when a man who'd been stripped of everything he'd ever known and only _then_ been tasked with saving humanity found comfort in what little remained of his dead beloved? Really? _Really?_

Abigail Mills expected better of herself.

The only possible if not _redeeming_ then at least _mitigating_ feature she could come up with was that she didn't think she was jealous of Katrina Crane as she existed as Ichabod Crane's _wife_. She was pretty sure she was jealous of Katrina as Crane's _partner_. The distinction was a relatively small one and she wasn't entirely sure the difference was even relevant, functionally speaking, but there was definitely a difference. She would be the first to admit that her madman of a partner was an attractive specimen in almost every conceivable way – and, she'd learned, in several ways she hadn't conceived at all until she'd noticed those attributes in him – but the thought of him with his wife didn't make her guts clench in anything but sympathy for the man who had become her partner and friend and was well on his way to becoming her best friend. She could imagine them together two hundred and fifty years in the past, walking arm-in-arm and sharing a private joke on a stroll or even in the throes of whatever passions eighteenth century lovers indulged in, and feel nothing but a warmth in her chest for them, marred only by a faint bittersweetness for Crane's loss. But as soon as she imagined him spilling his secrets to Katrina or asking for her help or, most of all, voluntarily laying his burdens at her feet… that she felt. That she definitely felt. That's where the jealousy came in.

It was a dumb distinction, she decided, and even if it weren't, it didn't matter. At best, it was just a few degrees difference on the Jerk scale.

"She know what's going on?" She managed to ask the question with her characteristic matter-of-factness.

"She knows something," he admitted after a contemplative moment, "but I'm not sure precisely how much. She told me of powers greater than those we are fighting and how those powers seek to teach and to guide. She cautioned us to learn the lessons these powers give us... that the lessons are costly."

Somehow his mostly-kind of-maybe-partially dead wife cautioning 'us' instead of just 'him' was worse.

She really was a bad person. Seriously. Who did that? Who _did_ that? She'd found in Crane a soul worthy of her trust, and that was something she'd never even wanted to give before, and she was going to start getting gut-punched every time he gained genuinely helpful information from his mostly-kind of-maybe-partially dead wife? Really?

"Any idea what those lessons are?" she asked.

"None." She could hear the weary frustration in his voice. "She spoke in the future tense, though, so I think it reasonable to assume that we have not yet missed one."

He paused long enough for her to risk darting a glance at him. He looked morose, as he often did after meeting his wife in her purgatory.

Once again, she felt the stark absence of the beautiful, poignant thing she _should_ be saying to him to make him feel better. Were their positions reversed, he would offer her _some_ kind of encouragement (which she would appreciate at a level so deeply personal that she would run once again into the problem of not being able to accept the gift properly) and he'd do it with a soft sincerity she could feel in her chest because she'd be able to hear that he believed what he was saying in his heart.

"I don't suppose these 'greater powers' have some big-ass swords they want to use for us," she said.

It really wasn't what she was going for but she risked another look at Crane and was just in time to see a faint smile cross his lips. She felt a smile bloom on her own face in response.

"Odd," he said. "I asked Katrina the very same thing." She felt him give her a faintly disapproving look as he added, "Though perhaps not as... colorfully... stated."

"You know me," said Mills. "I love me some colorful statements."

"Whoever our instructors are," Crane said, "they are limiting their role to that and that alone: instructors. I fear that there will be no 'big-ass swords'" – and she could clearly hear him putting air quotes around it – "coming to our aid."

She resisted the urge to sigh. A big old sword of light and truth and justice could be useful. She'd learn how to use a sword for that.

"What of the body, Lieutenant?" Crane prompted her after a moment of silence, broken only by the increasingly loud pounding of the rain on the windshield. He waved toward the streaming water. "If it is suffering the same…ailment…as our previous victim, I'm afraid we may be too late."

"The captain wasn't specific," she replied, "but I don't think I've pissed him off enough recently that he'd send us out here to look at a puddle of salt water." She shook her head. "Said we had to see it for ourselves. Thinks it's related somehow."

Crane made a noncommittal noise in his throat. "Perhaps branded with the seal of Moloch like a wayward steer."

Mills risked another sidelong glance at him, commenting with a hint of humor, "You're certainly in a mood."

"I just saw my dead wife, Lieutenant," Crane countered with uncharacteristic sharpness… then immediately deflated. "My apologies, Miss Mills." He let out a breath. "That was uncalled for."

She quirked a humorless smile at him. "No worries, Crane," she said, truly meaning it. "Wasn't the time to tease you. I should have known better. My bad." She paused, pretty certain that wasn't a proper apology for him, then qualified, "My apologies."

Crane seemed to sink further into his seat. "Dead," he muttered. "'Dead'. One would think a word such as that would be remarkably easy to use… either applicable or not depending on a very strict set of criteria. Yet this ostensibly so simple word with its ostensibly so strict criteria can be used to describe Katrina; and yet, simultaneously, it cannot. It can be used to describe _me_, Lieutenant; and yet, it cannot."

"'Mostly-kind of-maybe-partially dead'?" Mills offered without thinking.

He was silent, terribly silent, and for a long, horrible minute she was afraid she'd done irreparable damage. She had spoken without thinking. She'd spoken flippantly, dismissively, of something he obviously, _naturally_, took so very seriously. She'd tried to make light of something that -

And then he laughed.

He _roared_.

She blinked. She had no idea what to do.

So she drove.

He laughed some more and she drove some more.

Right about the time she was about to give in and mutter, "Any time now, Crane", he took a deep, steadying breath and his laughter slowly subsided.

"Oh, Miss Mills." His voice was somewhat muffled as he'd produced a handkerchief out of one of his myriad pockets and was busily dabbing at his eyes, but it was warm, openly so, with affection. "You are not gifted with eloquence, nor with a genteel tongue… and yet you never cease to find the most profoundly accurate way to capture the vagaries of the human condition and the inescapable and unfathomable complexities of the world through which it stumbles. It is truly a gift, Miss Mills. One I cherish."

She blinked. "Uh." She blinked again. "Thanks." She pulled the car over to the side of the road, just behind the squad car that had secured the crime scene, and shut it off. "I think."

She paused for one more moment, silently debating if albatrosses and hypothetical cats constituted an accurate portrayal of the human condition or merely insanity, then shook her head and arched herself around her seat to look into the back seat. She was simultaneously unsurprised and only mildly disappointed to note that there were no rain ponchos there. She sighed.

She didn't waste any more time and hopped directly out of the car and into the pouring rain, vaguely aware of Crane following her without hesitation. She was almost immediately soaked through though an umbrella magically, albeit belatedly, appeared over her head.

It was the same young officer who had been at the previous crime scene. He was wearing a poncho this time and didn't have a bunch of witnesses to corral and calm, but it was still unmistakably him. He didn't look particularly pleased to be there. In fact, he looked almost as shell-shocked as he had the last time. She didn't ask him what he'd done to deserve getting these kinds of calls.

"What've you got?" she asked him, nodding her appreciation of the umbrella even though she was already well on her way to catching her death of cold. Wasn't the kid's fault she didn't have a damned raincoat.

"Uh. Well, Lieutenant…"

She wasn't used to getting unhelpful answers from other cops and she was pretty sure her arched and unimpressed eyebrow communicated that effectively because he hastily gave up trying to explain and just gestured for her to follow. She and Crane exchanged nods and, blinking as best they could against the pounding rain, made their way after the kid.

The rain was coming down hard enough that she could barely see in front of her. That wasn't a problem up until she almost ran directly into their victim. Crane managed to tug her back in time.

Like this previous victim, this one was captured in perfect detail… from the way his trouser hems bunched up over his expensive looking shoes, to the immaculate cut of an obviously custom-tailored suit jacket, to the angle of his shoulders as he turned partially to look behind him, to the expression of fear on his face that mirrored almost exactly the expression his predecessor had made in the moment before her own death.

Unlike the previous victim, though, the macabre detail of this one's death had not been captured in sparkling, brilliantly white salt.

It had been etched into stone.

Rivulets of rain water coursed down over him.

"I think a simple 'dead' will work for this one," said Mills in an undertone.

Crane's tone matched her own, even as he once again followed the victim's line of sight off into the distance to see what the man had turned around to see in his final moment of life. "We are in agreement, Lieutenant."


End file.
